How to Publish Your Blog on Amazon Kindle

If not, you should do it, pronto! It’s easy, it’s productive and it’s free.

We’re not talking about publishing ebooks or PDFs, but your dynamic and regularly updated blog.

Rather surprisingly, not a lot of bloggers have considered this option hitherto, but some big guns, including The New York Times, PC Magazine, Amazon Daily, Huffington Post, and others—that realize the potential—are already there.

On a positive note, that means less competition for you.

Is it really worth the effort?

Kindle publishing for blogs has already opened the doors to myriad opportunities for many businesses that have a blog.

Amazingly, all you need to do is invest just five minutes of your precious time. Here’s what you get in return:

New readers

Millions of people use Amazon Kindle as their ereader.

So, by publishing on Kindle you’ll pull in people who might never hear about your business otherwise.

There are several reasons, but the main ones are that it costs only 99 cents to subscribe to a blog on Kindle, and it offers added handiness. Obviously, not all the Kindle owners want to be reading ebooks all the time when they can access more vibrant and au fait weblogs.

SEO

How on earth can kindle publishing help your SEO? It does not. Apparently, it doesn’t improve your blog’s ranking in SERPs.

But it can raise your profile.

Amazon is an authority even in the eyes of Google, and having your blog there gives you more exposure.

So even if nobody subscribes to your blog via Kindle, you’re getting free publicity and people searching for relevant keywords will surely be tempted to take a look at your blog after seeing it listed on the largest online retailer.

Added income

It’s free money. You get 30% of the total price, which is set by Amazon and can be anything between $0.99 and $1.99. So if you get, say, 1000 people to subscribe to your blog via Kindle, and the price is $0.99, you’ll make $297.

It may not be that lucrative for large publications, but it’s still a decent choice for solopreneurs and bloggers who don’t want to clutter their blogs with ads.

Higher conversion rate

Unfortunately, the JavaScript and ads are stripped off Kindle-displayed blogs, and only text content, links and images are displayed. So if your Call to Action involves more than just clicking a plain link, make sure you encourage your Kindle subscribers to view the page on another device.

Feedback

If your blog’s available for Kindle, people will be able to rate it, just like they rate any other product on Amazon.

If your blog features high-quality content (which I am sure it does), this is the easiest, and arguably the most efficient way to get endorsement and feedback.

3 steps to publishing your blog on Kindle

Ready to get your blog onto the Kindle platform? Great!

Note that this functionality is currently available to the residents of the USA and the UK only.

1. Create your Kindle Publishing Account

2. Add and publish

When you log into your Kindle publishing account, click Add Blog, and fill in the signup form.

Once you’re done adding all the info, hit Generate Blog Preview.

If you get the blog preview, cool. Go to step three!

If you get an error as shown in the image below, don’t get teary. Just click the Save button and then hit Return to Dashboard. Here, you’ll see your blog has been saved as a draft. Open it and try again, and this time there will be no error.

Now go ahead and click the Publish button.

Don’t forget to add a screenshot (choose the most appealing page on your blog), as it will be displayed on the Amazon sales page.

At the end of the day, it should look something like this:

3. Choose payment options

You’ll be redirected to a page where you can enter your address, business type etc. and choose the desired payment option. After that, your blog may take 48 to 72 hours to appear on Amazon.

How it works

To make a long story short, this is a quick self-publishing tool to help you sell your blog on the Kindle store.

Its working is similar to RSS: your updates are auto-delivered wirelessly to the Kindle and updated throughout the day.

The only difference is that instead of just the headline, your readers can access the full text content plus most images on your blog. Moreover, the updates are downloaded to the Kindle and can be read even when the device is not connected to the internet.

A couple of moans

On a 70-30 revenue share, the bossy retailer walks away with the lion’s share and the publisher gets the smaller piece for all his hard work. That sounds cruel, but your blog is available freely on the internet … remember?

The more annoying aspect is that you can neither regulate the price, nor give away your blog subscription for free.

And in addition to the advertising, the useful social networking links for Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and Facebook are also removed> I don’t have much respect for that!

Is it really the Next Big Thing?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Yes, you can reach out to a sizeable readership through the Amazon Kindle, but don’t expect to make big bucks out of it. However it goes along, it’s a fascinating idea and part of the constant move to mobility.

Do you have any questions or suggestions about Kindle publishing for blogs? Let’s discuss them in the comments.

This guest post is by Ali Abbas. Check out his Blog if you want to: improve your writing skills, land better-paying writing gigs or learn some ‘kinky’ ways to drive traffic to your website. Ali is a young, enthusiastic freelance writer and blogger. Click here to learn more about him.

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I thought there was a way to do this, but never really knew how easy it was. I just set up two separate sites (college football oriented) and am currently awaiting approval. I do not own a Kindle but my mom does so I know I will get at least one new reader.

Thanks for sharing this how-to. I appreciated it and look forward to seeing how this all goes.

Great post Ali, i was wondering when someone was going to finally post a how to on getting your blog on Amazon. I published my blog on Amazon about 2 months ago but I had to research and research and research all over the web to get the right information on how to do it. I wish this post was made about 2 months ago lol.

Yeah, just discovered that. That indeed would have been useful to include in the post…just went through the whole process to discover I can’t publish ’cause I live in Germany, even though my blog is in English. This sucks.

Amazing Blog Post! It gave me good knowledge about Amazon Kindle and I am looking forward to post my blog in it. After all at a subscription cost of only 99 cents is good enough to get millions of visitors even though it doesn’t improve the goggle ranking but getting acknowledged is the first priority for most of the bloggers I guess.

See what happened with Facebook. It cut out part of the interent to itself. Amazon is about to do exactly that and it’s best to follow the never failing advice, ‘send every hit back to your site’. Otherwise, it will be too late, when you realize all your marketing efforts on the Kindle market cannot work elsewhere.

I’ve known about this for over a year, but only people who reside in the US and the UK have this option. Your blog post was a reminder for me to check in again with Amazon to see when it will be open for Canadians.

I had no idea this was even possible. But come to think of it, when I first got my kindle, I was able to subscribe to Mashable for 99 cents. It just never occurred to me that, as a blog writer, I could do the same.
Thanks for the idea!

Excellent post, timely information, clearly presented – thanks very much! I’ve set this up for my blog – currently “pending approval.” Like most things Amazon related, the process was clean, quick and easy!

I’m excited by this idea…but Amazon doesn’t seem to want to help me out with this. I see this is a Beta…not sure it’s always functioning properly. I keep trying to sign in, but it just brings me back to the same main page and never takes me to the place where I can preview my blog and add it.

Does having your full blog post in two places (on your blog and on Amazon) create any duplicate content issues with Google? Sounds like a great idea as long as you don’t get dinged for having duplicate posts.

Thanks for the info. You’re right; it was easy. I just added the trailsnet blog to Kindle. Everything went well. The money isn’t a big deal, but I’m hoping the added exposure will make more people aware of the blog/website.

Thank you for sharing this information. The advantage the Kindle subscribers would have is that it automatically downloads to the device. They could read the blog offline which would just take down one more barrier to getting it read.
My blog is new and I am glad to add this to my tool box. Once I get it more functional and looking more like what I envisioned, I plan to start promoting it in late January.

Very useful article Ali – I didn’t even know there was an option to publish your blog on Kindle!

I’ve just completed the steps (took about half an hour, including prepping the screenshots etc) and my blog has now been submitted. Thanks a lot for sharing and I hope you continue to be successful in your own business.

Wow, this is great. I have been thinking of creating a membership site for sharing my top content. But I think the Kindle option can also be a good alternative at least to start with. The only drawback I cant see that your content on the blog presumably needs to be set to public view in order for Kindle to pick it up so the same content is also available free. Don’t see much of an incentive for users to purchase the content.

Thank you so much for writing this – love your writing, btw. I meant to do this a few years ago and forgot or never had the time to do it. So just added my 4 blogs – thank you! I love passive income opportunities like this – especially when it is so easy.

Ali and Darren, your guest post sparked a little research. I’m trying to decide whether I should publish the my website to kindel. Eventually, I would like to use some posts and recipes in future e-books. So would publishing on kindle make me compete with myself? Turn off loyal readers who may have subscribed that now see similar content?

During my research, I saw that the amazon blog->kindle program has been in BETA since 2009 — and since the user terms say that you can’t talk about your experience, no posts have been written by anyone who “kindeled” their blog to let us know how the program has gone for them.

More importantly, I was considering this for more exposure on amazon, but searching through amazon’s kindle store, I didn’t find anywhere to actually purchase a blog interface.

So… I would love to hear, even anonymously, from someone who has been through the process, and see where people can subscribe to other blogs via kindle.

So much great information here. I literally am taking this information in tiny blocks as my brain is not large enough to process it all. I am off to look for other articles from you. Great job and thank you so much.